…the song he sent was actually recorded by his own band. Matt told me that when he added the song to his Zune, he put no DRM on it, and indeed his preference would be to let me have it with no protections so I could keep it and even share it as much as I wanted with friends. But the way Zune handles its song sharing, its draconian DRM is slapped on tunes indiscriminately, whether the artists want it there or not. That stinks.

And yet, if you rename a song on your Zune to {song.mp3}.JPG, you can “squirt” the file to any number of friends without any DRM being added. The “squirtee” has to then sync their Zune so that they can rename the file back to it’s original name. Not really all that easy, but a way around the stupid DRM.

I think it’s been said before, but the Zune as a piece of hardware is a nice idea, but the implementation of the software on that thing is horrid. Has anyone ever seen one in the wild before? I only see them on display at Radio Shack and Target and I’ve never seen anyone standing in front of the unit playing with it. Poor Zune. Poor poor Zune.

I’d thought that the Zune had a “good screen”. It turns out were being fed a line there, too. It’s bigger than the one on the video iPod but the resolution is no higher. A little bigger but somewhat more blurry–big deal.

Some of the Archos players have large screens, but I don’t know what resolution they’re using. It’s unlikely to be lower than that of the Zune.

The Zune really seems to have nothing going for it. And if you buy one you also get the dubious pleasure of paying a tax to Universal.

Not only the iPods but also the Sandisks and Creative Zens are doing better at Amazon than the Zune:

All of Microsoft’s energetic “astroturfing” for the Zune has got it nowhere, which just goes to show that, as Lincoln is said to have said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”